If secrets pique your interest, Sarah Bruggeman, the pastry chef at Vecchio’s Italian Market & Delicatessen, will have your mouth watering.
She refuses to reveal the recipe for the chocolate ginger cookies, which are the most popular cookies sold at Vecchio’s, located at 14 W. Jennings St. in Newburgh, Indiana.
“You have to like ginger to like that cookie,” says Bruggeman, an Evansville native who has worked at Vecchio’s for four and a half years. “There’s fresh and ground ginger. The ginger — we actually peel, grate it — and there are no eggs in it, so they can last a little longer. I can’t give too much away. It’s a secret. That cookie is our pride and joy.”
Bruggeman studied baking and pastries at Sullivan University in Louisville, Kentucky, and is responsible for all of Vecchio’s sweet treats, including the unique twists on the common cookie.
The Everything but the Kitchen Sink cookie lives up to its name with chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, pretzels, potato chips, coffee, graham crackers, and oatmeal. Bruggeman jokes that the recipe used to include marshmallows, too, but “it was a little much.” She also makes a cornflake marshmallow chocolate chip, inspired by Momofuku Milk Bar, a bakery in New York City.
“The cornflake is different and I think that’s why people gravitate to it more. It tastes like breakfast, but a very unhealthy breakfast,” she says.
Vecchio’s also sells cookie flavors such as peanut butter chocolate chip oatmeal, double chocolate chip, cranberry almond oatmeal, chocolate chip, as well as others.
“We try not to do real traditional cookies here,” she says. “Even our chocolate chip cookie is made with 60 percent chocolate with a lot of chunks in it. It’s definitely not like your typical chocolate chip cookie.”
For more information about Vecchio’s Italian Market & Delicatessen, call 812-490-7879 or vecchiositalianmarket.com.
In early 2014, Vecchio’s Chef and Owner Amanda Hancock was diagnosed with liver disease. Vecchio’s will move from 14 W. Jennings St. to 300 W. Jennings St. at the end of January, and is for sale. We are happy to announce Amanda received a liver transplant in mid-January and we wish her well.
